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Why does the Youtube Shorts interface suck so bad
(hexbear.net)
This is an oddly specific issue, but I like really zooming in when writing a comment, right? I feel like it helps me concentrate. And so, when watching YT shorts on my PC, I'm constantly accidentally going to the previous or next short, when I'm just trying to adjust my zoom a little... Thereby deleting my whole comment!
Like, it would be so ridiculously easy to implement if nothing else a warning that says, "Are you sure you want to go to the next video? Your comment will be lost!"
But alas.
And the lack of a seekbar on YouTube shorts annoys the Hell out of me, too. The intent with that is obviously so that you're forced to watch through the whole video instead of being able to skip ahead, and then if there's a thing earlier in the video that you want to go back to, you have to rewatch that. It's 100% just a way to forcefully increase watch time at the cost of user experience, but oh, it's so Sleek™ to avoid all the clutter of a user interface that lets you actually do stuff...
...The secret, by the way, is to replace shorts/ in the URL with watch?v=. This lets you watch YouTube shorts as just normal YouTube videos with the same interface and layout you're already used to.
Why is it siloed off into its own thing anyway?
You know darn well why, my friend: YouTube's trying to make a knockoff TikTok, and if TikTok does the scrolling videos thing, then YouTube must, too. Because obviously we couldn't have one app that does one format well and another that does another well — YouTube won't stop at anything short of total domination of online video streaming!